The Sister

by Lynne Alexander

  ‘‘So,’’ I observed, ‘‘you have risen in the world.’’

  And you have sunk, he was big enough not to say. Instead: ‘‘And you still have a good while to live.’’ Naturally he’d assumed such reassurance of lastingness would please me. It did not.

  ‘‘That is not what I want to hear, you idiot!’’ I yawped. Nothing could warm my spinsterish heart, I explained, but to be told the end was nigh.

  Seeing the havoc he’d wrought, he then tried to patch it up: ‘‘Oh, but you won’t be uncomfortable.’’

  ‘‘Uncomfortable? What can you know about it?’’

  Poor Bowles-Tuckey, looking as if he might burst into tears, began mopping his brow with a tiny pink handkerchief. I burst out laughing: Was I once infatuated with this pert little Lazarus?

  ‘‘Perhaps,’’ Katharine interjected, ‘‘You could give us a demonstration so that we might learn the trick of it?’’ After all, had she not already learned how to administer morphine by the hypodermic method, and hadn’t Harriet Martineau’s niece been taught how to hypnotize her aunt to soothing effect? His gaze travelled slowly from one of us to the other and seeing that we were not to be separated and that it was something we would manage or not together, he nodded, reaching into the depths of his travelling bag out of which arose a bulky object wrapped in black fabric which he unwrapped ceremoniously flap by flap staring down at it as it lay in his lap like a man in love, or as if he himself had been hypnotized. The object – indeed striking to the eye – was an ornately carved silver gilt lancet case.

  ‘‘Mr Bowles … Tuckey … whatever your name is,’’ she held up her hand as he began lifting the thing from its case, ‘‘I hope you do not intend to perform a bloodletting.’’

  His smile was a crooked one.

  He denied it.

  I wished he was less handsome.

  ‘‘In that case,’’ Katharine permitted: ‘‘please proceed.’’

  Here Bowles-Tuckey flipped open the lid to reveal two ‘thumb’ lancets made of mother-of-pearl with gold rivet indentations like huge golden moons or eyes for the comfortable placing of the thumb while performing a phlebotomy. Oh, but these would not be used for such a violent, bloody purpose – quite the reverse, he reassured us.

  ‘‘Indeed, you will feel relaxed, refreshed and pain free.’’

  ‘‘Do you guarantee it?’’ asked Katharine.

  ‘‘I am merely your source,’’ came his narrow-eyed reply: ‘‘It is for you to reap the benefit.’’ So saying, he brought the open lancet case close to my face, at first level with my eyes but then raised it to a position above my forehead which Katharine complained could he not see was causing a strain to the eyes and eyelids; which in turn caused him to lose his temper and shout at her did he not know precisely what he was doing and there must be no talking whatsoever during the session, was that perfectly clear?

  She raised a hand as if to order him out of the house or strike him but I entreated her to desist.

  ‘‘Continue, Arthur,’’ said I.

  So he did, instructing me to keep my eyes steadily fixed on the lancets within their case, my mind riveted on the idea of them. What ‘idea’ could a pair of lancets possibly have? I thought, ready to dismiss the thing for a farce. But as I stared at them the gold moon-like indentations seemed to stare back at me so that I could not take my own eyes away if I had tried (though I was vaguely aware that my neck had begun to ache). At some point he moved the case downwards which for some reason caused my eyes to close. Then darkness. I felt one of my arms being floated up towards the ceiling where it remained for some time before floating back to earth.

  At this point he instructed me in a wispy voice to imagine myself in ‘a happy place’. I was about to shout, There is no such place! when a vivid memory-picture arose of the Falls at Niagara where I had been taken by Aunt Kate. I am eighteen years old standing before the Falls unable to move or be moved, hypnotized by its apparent mass like a flowing sheet of curved solid glass as it slides continually over the ridge followed at last by a cataclysmic separation into individual droplets in which I feel myself falling falling falling. …

  ‘‘Alice!’’ came the snap of his fingers. Or perhaps it was the lid of the lancet case shutting, I do not know, but all at once I was wide awake.

  ‘‘How are you feeling, Alice?’’

  I admitted to a sensation of warmth in my back and breast.

  ‘‘And the pain?’’

  I smiled, ‘‘What pain?’’

  Sixty-nine

  ‘‘Confine yourself to the vernacular,’’ advised Katharine: ‘‘no decorative bequeaths.’’

  So I began, ‘‘I, Alice James, Spinster of the Town of Manchester in the County of Essex and Commonwealth of Massachusetts, in the United States of America, now living at 41 Argyll Road, Kensington, England, make this my will and testament as follows …’’.

  My property (I still owned the Manchester (US) cottage) and stocks, which amounted to an estate worth about $80,000, I left to William, Henry and Katharine, to be divided equally. To Rob and his family – he had a rich father-in-law – I left $10,000. The remaining I divided among various female friends and relatives; and to my namesake, Wilky’s daughter, I left a gold watch and $2500. Rob’s daughter, Mary, and William’s daughter, Peggy, were to get $2500 a piece.

  Katharine began adding the figures. A sum remained.

  ‘‘Yes, another $1000 is for your cousin Alice Gray.’’ She had earned my admiration by struggling for years without money to pursue a career in art.

  ‘‘That leaves $150.’’

  ‘‘Yes, that’s for Wardy – Miss Ward.’’

  For the rest, all my Boston furniture, including the portrait of Henry, was to go to William and Alice; and my pictures, china, and English furniture also to Henry.

  To Katharine, all my remaining personal effects: silver, jewelry &etc.

  The American Consul at Birmingham had been contacted by Katharine and wangled into coming to witness it. How good to get a Boston witness, I thought. Yet when the time came I lay in a semi-faint, draped in as many frills as could be found for the occasion, with Wardy at my head wearing the thickest layer of her anxious-devoted-nurse-expression. The Consul kept threatening to read the Will out loud, but Katharine restrained him with difficulty – causing him great frustration – arresting the flood of his eloquence.

  Finally – it was like a scene in a novel – the document was placed before me. Through a mist I vaguely saw five black figures – others had been called upon as witnesses, including Annie Richards and a Miss Blanche Leppington – and so I signed, barely recognizing my own wayward signature. Eventually they all trooped off to Henry’s for an elegant tea served by The Smiths, where the Consul, according to Henry, entertained them with his whole history and the digestive processes of his domestic circle. ‘‘You were well out of it.’’

  At the end of it all Miss Leppington had confided to Katharine, ‘‘Alice’s face will remain in my thoughts as the most pathetic I ever saw and in my imagination as the most picturesque and American.’’

  When Henry heard of it, he told me, ‘‘Well, you can’t say you’ve done nothing for your Race since you’ve brought that about – the picturesque and the American – in your own person.’’

  Picturesque at last, I thought: and American!

  Seventy

  ‘‘What is it, Alice?’’

  ‘‘Nothing.’’

  ‘‘You have at least three stories inside you, Alice. Choose one.’’ Tea or coffee, simple. She’d bought me the fattest scribbler she could find. Places; people; things people say … but a story? It was, I began to see, a quite different kind of writing from the scraps, the letters, the diary entries …

  ‘‘I will never manage,’’ I said miserably. ‘‘I will surely peg out before the end.’’

  ‘‘Never mind, do as much as you can.’’

  Katharine is my obedient scribe. When I hesitate, she hesitates. When I stumb
le, it is if her hand has been snagged. On good days we swoop and pounce together kestrel-like, and then there is progress. On bad days however when I have trouble concentrating I must steer through it in the way of a child on a bicycle wobbling her way between two converging carriages.

  There are too many images in my head at once, too many possibilities all clamoring for attention like needy children. There is the ‘real’ Constance and the ‘idea’ of Constance. But she must be transformed into Hectoria. And in spite of her absurd name she must not be absurd.

  ‘‘Did you know she was the grand-niece of James Fenimore Cooper?’’ I informed Katharine. Yes, of course she did. But there she was obediently taking down my words, my drug-fueled imaginings spooling and spiralling from who-knew-where; while her hand – riding along – loop-de-loop – steered by invisible filaments – formed the words, sentences, paragraphs on the page. Such gentle obedience, such mansuetude. The word pleased me; its literal meaning: ‘accustomed to the hand’.

  But the story so far?

  What story?

  It comes as in a dream. Or perhaps it is a dream. Hectoria has gone to Venice. She has taken rooms in the Casa Semitecolo. It is winter and there is freezing fog which enters her chest with every breath like so many ectoplasmic goblins. She has had a bad bout of influenza. Her nose streams unromantically and she is feverish. Will he come? she thinks, gazing out into the fog, and then fears it, aware of looking as unattractive as she does. But that is absurd: if he comes, everything will be all right, she will be restored.

  ‘‘Can she be that naïve?’’ challenges Katharine.

  ‘‘Naïve?’’ Oh, I see the problem. I have not done her justice. She must tell her own story, how it feels to pace back and forth on that cold Italian floor, to wait for someone who may never come, to shiver and sweat with fever, to feel her life as a writer has come to an end, that all her ideas have fizzled out while up on the roof a cat yowls …

  I ran a finger along the still-wet needle trail on my arm. I brought the finger to my lips. My decision, writ in blood on my forearm, was made. I would claim the ‘I’ for myself; or rather, for my character, Hectoria. She who will demand, and get attention from the reader, even if she cannot get it from the lover she desires; will get it when she chooses; seduce when it pleases her. The taste of blood, even if it is only her own. Writer and reader, fated to become lovers.

  ‘‘Alice?’’

  The taste of drugs, sharp, sweet, bitter, like a Sicilian orange, the kind, according to Henry, which grow only in the shadow of a volcano.

  ‘‘Of course Henry will hate it,’’ I pronounced. He will call it cheap and easy. ‘‘In fiction,’’ I mimicked Henry at his most constipated, ‘‘there must be distance, observation, space, in which to expose the impediments to understanding a character and his feelings. The novelist, that is to say, should abhor the terrible fluidity (oh, how it comes pouring out!) of self-revelation.’’

  I’m afraid we burst out laughing. Poor Henry, as if such ‘revelation’ were akin to disembowelling. But where was I? Where was Hectoria? Still pacing her cold rooms feeling … what? No narrator on earth, however fine of perception, could ever be as intimate with the truth of how she felt about what happened, or failed to happen, as she. It is too easy to hide behind the so-called ‘objective’ voice (‘she imagined’, ‘she wished’, ‘she remembered’, ‘she succumbed’, etc.). But I am too exhausted to continue. I must wait for her voice to speak to me. For her to come to me.

  ‘‘But must she be so pathetic?’’ asks Katharine gently.

  ‘‘No, only truthful.’’

  ‘‘And what is to happen?’’

  ‘‘Happen?’’

  ‘‘In the end?’’

  Ah. I closed my eyes. One of the muscles in my cheek began to twitch and then, to my horror, came a most inappropriate snigger as I imagined Hectoria’s dumpy little body floating down from her hotel balcony like an unfurled umbrella, eventually landing like a pile of funeral garb on the cobbles of that picturesque little street. At the same time my tears flew out incontinently, unstoppably as I heard her singing out Henry’s name (but I must change that absent character’s name, of course): operatically, absurdly, hilariously. Katharine attempted to staunch the flow with her hankie but I pushed her hand away. What I had to convey was her desperation to be cherished, her simple, human longing for love. She must come across not as naïve but brave, imbued with a kind of foolish hopeful American trust …

  ‘‘The problem with the ‘picturesque’, I complained, ‘‘is that it cannot tolerate the real thing.’’

  ‘‘The real thing?’’

  ‘‘Her body must be removed from the cobbles of that picturesque street, the Consul must close the area. Gossip must be avoided at all costs.’’

  ‘‘I’m afraid there is another problem, dear, closer to hand,’’ declares Katharine, the pedant; to wit: ‘‘How can she narrate her own suicide?’’

  I open my eyes. I do not know. But I can do no more. I must rest and so must Katharine. Her eyes are slitty and red-rimmed behind her spectacles as if she has not slept in a week or been silently sobbing her heart out.

  *

  A week later, unaccountably, she brings a photographer in to ‘shoot’ me. Wardy forces my arms into a satin bed jacket and ties a necktie rakishly around what is left of my scrawny neck. I think of a sentence out of Portrait of a Lady: ‘Her poor winged spirit had always had a great desire to do its best, and it had not as yet been seriously discouraged.’ But the resulting photograph showed nothing so much as a dried moth pinned to a page.

  Seventy-one

  William had claimed that cremation was fussy and expensive but my Kath, not one to be discouraged, wrote to the Cremation people at Woking outside London for their circular and lo! it turned out to be as simple and inexpensive as toasting marshmallows, and only six guineas and one extra for a parson. So my body is to be carried in a hearse to the Waterloo Station and from there by train to Woking where an anonymous clergyman will read a short, no-fuss service; then I will be well charred on both sides and my ashes scraped into a little wooden box.

  ‘‘Where d’you want it placed?’’ asks Katharine.

  I look up to find her removing streaks of grime from the wall-paper with a bit of india rubber.

  It? I had not extended my imagination that far. ‘‘It really is the mind-twistingest of all conundrums.’’

  ‘‘Is it, Alice?’’ Rub-rub-rub.

  ‘‘How am I to decide on where I want to ‘be’ when I won’t ‘be’ at all?’’

  She calls it ‘a simple choice’.

  ‘‘As in coffee or tea?’’

  No reply.

  ‘‘Well, then,’’ I hear myself say, ‘‘I should not like my bones buried in this damp, black alien English earth.’’

  ‘‘There will be no bones as such’’ – brushing her hands into a pan – ‘‘only grit and ash.’’

  ‘‘Ah.’’

  Then: ‘‘I could carry it – the remains – back with me,’’ she offers, magnanimous to a fault.

  Me, she means; and ‘back’ to the States.

  ‘‘Oh,’’ say I, ‘‘I couldn’t endure the journey again.’’

  ‘‘You won’t have to,’’ grins the imp: ‘‘While I’m tucked up in my top berth convulsed with seasickness, you may be assured of a peaceful journey.’’

  ‘‘You have thought of everything, haven’t you?’’

  ‘‘If I do not,’’ she replies, tossing the india rubber to me: ‘‘who will?’’

  Really, it is the most bizarre conversation I have ever had in my life, or rather death.

  Dearest Willy,

  It has been decided. I-as-ash in my eventual marble urn (to be designed by you, I gather) am not to be used as a parlor ornament for your new house but to be buried beside Father and Mother in the cemetery at Cam. Otherwise, as Henry warned, we shall become myths. I presume he meant ‘we’ exiles here in the Old World. I hope that meets with
your approval.

  Yours ever, Alice

  Were those my bones rattling as I signed?

  It was time for my sponge bath. Wardy removed my nightdress revealing the folds of flesh which had begun to drape themselves about my bones. The tumor was doing its best to outgrow the breast itself. I tried to hide the horror from Wardy but she would not be denied: she had seen worse, she assured me, in her short time. ‘‘What worse?’’ I asked ghoulishly. To which she maddeningly replied, ‘‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’’ So then I countered with: ‘‘Well, did you know’’ – in my scare-mongeryest voice – ‘‘that witches are known to have three breasts?’’ At which she drew back as before a revenant making desperate grab for the crucifix she insisted on wearing outside her apron.

  But the silly had already guessed I was ‘one of those’.

  But here comes a surprise. She is sponging my back when suddenly, in mid-sponge – quite astonishingly – she asks: ‘‘Should you have liked to decorate your own home, Miss?’’

  The question affects me more than I can say. However I manage to hide it by having one of my retching fits. As for an eventually answer, my tongue is tied, my vocal cords could be sold for old shroud lashing. The truth? I cannot fib; not while dying.

  ‘‘Yes,’’ I manage at last, all quivery-quavery: ‘‘yes, I should.’’

  She cocks her head to one side. ‘‘You surprise me, Miss.’’

  ‘‘Do I? I see no reason’’ – a rush of breath returns – ‘‘why a taste for pretty wallpaper should not co-exist with a taste for the vote.’’

  But my little speech exhausts me and I fall into a reverie in which I am busy papering an entire wall in my bedroom at Quincy Street, the one that overlooks Harvard Yard. What do I choose? Why, black-edged ‘In Memoriam’ cards.

  ‘‘There, there,’’ soothes the Pious One with her long narrow Fra Angelica face, assuring me my unshriven soul will enter Paradise.

  I have no interest in Paradise, I tell her, and ban her from wearing the cross. But then I think wonderingly about how while I’d been an invalid in my Quincy Street bedroom Miss Eustacia Ward had been toddling about a Gloucestershire village. And here she was now looking after me. Was that not a more fantastic thing than Paradise? I thought as a blessed peace fell upon me. How I got from the bath to my bed I cannot say.